Business Intelligence

BI projects don’t have to mean black holes of money with LobsterPot. We can work with you to quickly transform and automate some of your data into a data warehouse, build a simple analysis platform and get basic reports published in a matter of days. There may be some data cleansing required down the track, but you will quickly be able to achieve insight into your business data, getting more information than you may have known before. With experts in using the full set of Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS), Reporting Services (SSRS), Office and more, LobsterPot consultants are able to deliver Business Intelligence quicker than ever before.

Power BI / Cortana

Data Analytics projects today involve so much more than traditional business intelligence. LobsterPot Solutions can help enable your business for consuming data in close-to-real time, through mechanisms such as Azure Service Bus’ Event Hub, Azure Stream Analytics, SQL Server R Services, and more, including self-service reporting through Power BI. No matter what your data source is, there are ways to analyse it so that your business can benefit.

Proofs of Concept

Many of our clients have concerns about projects, and want to see that they will be able to get proper business value out of their data projects. Whether investigating the value of the cloud or cubes, SharePoint or spatial, LobsterPot can work with you to help prove whether or not these technologies are right for you. The work we do could form the basis of follow-up project, or could simply be binned if the concept doesn’t seem to grab. We can help you work out what you want for your business.

Dashboards and Reporting

Knowing effective ways to present information is important for anyone hoping to be able to use their business data effectively. Through data visualisation techniques and a variety of platform technologies including SharePoint, Office, and custom reporting portals, through to PivotViewer collections and Silverlight charting, LobsterPot is able to present your data in ways that meet your needs.

Query Writing

LobsterPot boasts some of the best in the world at query writing, whether in T-SQL or MDX. LobsterPot’s principal consultant Rob Farley has taught and presented seminars around the world about both advanced and simple querying, and is well able to help your staff both solve their querying problems and learn how to improve their querying overall.

Performance Tuning

Whether tuning queries or tuning the underlying infrastructure, LobsterPot consultants are well able to get more out of your SQL Server. Don’t spend money on hardware before talking to LobsterPot about how to get more out of the existing system. Whether the problems are related to poorly written queries, unnecessary blocking, memory allocation or even the physical hardware, LobsterPot Solutions will be able to locate bottlenecks and advise accordingly.

Migration and Upgrades

No matter whether you’re using SharePoint 2.0, SQL 2000, Oracle, or even the latest versions of the full Microsoft stack, at some point, upgrading or migration will be needed. Our staff at LobsterPot are well able to advise about the impact that new versions can have, and the risks associated with upgrading or migration systems. Being able to approach data migration with an appropriate level of caution balanced with an appreciation of the value in upgrading places us able to advise and assist you with your strategic migrations.

Design and Architecture

It’s important to be confident in the foundations of your projects. Through gaining an understanding of your business and the priorities of your project, LobsterPot consultants can produce a database design including the reporting platform and OLTP / OLAP databases, down to the underlying hardware. With the correct foundation, you can confidently move ahead in your projects.

Data Security

There’s a lot more to SQL Security than patching and firewalls. When even sun.com can suffer a SQL Injection attack, few can confidently say that they are safe from attack. LobsterPot staff are recognised experts in security within all facets of SQL Server, and able to both assess your system and advise on best practice and compliance. Security shouldn’t just mean locking people out, but should be method for providing people with the data they need.

System Reviews and Monitoring

No-one expects you to be the SQL expert, but that’s okay, because we are. We can perform a system review, monitor your key metrics, assess your High Availability systems and Disaster Recovery scenarios, and more. We can establish benchmarks to know how your system is performing under normal conditions, to assist with detecting changes that affect behaviour. We can assess your system for scalability and give you an overall SQL Health Check.

Consolidation

Many organisations pay far too much for licensing. Today’s computers are more powerful than ever and consolidation of systems presents a very real opportunity to reduce license costs and administration overhead through a smaller hardware footprint. LobsterPot consultants understand the various methods available for consolidation and have helped clients achieve massive savings through advice on licensing and consolidation.

Cloud Readiness

“To the Cloud” may be a catch-cry that seems irrelevant to many businesses, but having a database that is hosted by Microsoft presents a number of advantages, particularly around cost and manageability. Having a database which is cloud-ready can provide scale-out options as required, and even enables easier consolidation. LobsterPot can work with you to ensure that your databases are portable and able to be migrated easily.

Spatial

Lots of data involves location information, maybe addresses of customers, maybe the location of assets. With every version of SQL Server since 2008, spatial capabilities have been enhanced, and LobsterPot have a large amount of experience in catering for our clients’ spatial needs. We can provide interfaces that show your data on maps or plans, and have reports and dashboards that let you analyse your location data deeper than ever before.

Data Mining

Predicting the future is a strange art, but mathematical algorithms can take the magic out of it. LobsterPot can transform your data and apply data mining models to provide predictive insight into your data, helping you plan for the future and target your efforts. Data Mining can reveal information about your business that you may have never considered. It may seem like magic, but really isn’t when you involve someone like LobsterPot Solutions.

Troubleshooting

No-one wants problems with their servers, but if you’re having problems with yours, you can call us. We can take care of things, and explain to you what’s going on. Whatever the problem, LobsterPot staff are happy to help and will work with you to make sure that you can avoid similar problems in the future.